"The water is the fish’s element:
Leave her but there, and she is well content."
by John Bunyan
Aspects of Her Life
2017, 2020, 2022
Electronics, glass, ink, creative coding, computer vision
Dimensions variable
Who shares the authorship of artwork in the age of converging computational and biological systems? How does today’s entanglement of software, hardware, and wetware challenge us to reconsider an agency that is beyond human? Aspects of Her Life (2017, 2020, 2022) is the artist’s ongoing project that enables a machine and a fish to respond to each other’s presence and movement. Inspired by Harold “Doc” Edgerton and Gjon Mili’s photography experiments to capture a sequence of actions in one photograph, which alter the human perception of motion and movement, the installation records the cross-media interaction process and then outputs machine-assisted paintings and digital sculptures. This practice interrogates machine-life relationships and aims to evaluate the difference between control, communication, collaboration, and co-creation in an increasingly mediated age.
Aspects of Her Life (2017, 2020, 2022) is a piece of Frank Cong’s Authorship (2017 - ongoing) series. See other pieces of this series:
The Co-Author (2017, 2020)
Untitled (Fruit-fly Yeast) (2022 - ongoing)
Aspects of Her Life (2022), exhibition setup at Liu Haisu Museum, photograph by Frank Cong
Aspects of Her Life (2022), documentation video
Aspects of Her Life (2022), the painting machine, photograph by Damien Zhang
Poetic Data
Aspects of Her Life (2017), a 7-day (60 minutes per day) recording of the guppy’s trajectory
The dance of the fish is recorded as real-time data. And the system interprets the data in multiple ways to create varios aesthetic experiences for us to approach a different perception.
Aspects of Her Life (2022), machine-assisted paintings, 7 minutes * 21 days, photograph by Zihao Ouyang
Aspects of Her Life (2022), digital sculpture, real-time
Aspects of His Life (2022), experiment#4
Aspects of His Life (2022), experiment#4
Research Journal
Aspects of His Life (2017), machine sketches in Rhino
Aspects of His Life (2017), cross-media interaction prototype using Processing
Aspects of His Life (2017), cross-media interaction with a guppy
Aspects of His Life (2022), machine design in Fusion 360
